I'm using a freshly-installed Windows 7 Professional 64-bit machine. It is currently updated with all available updates. It is running Microsoft Security Essentials as its Anti-virus, completely up to date. It is crashing, hard, as if the power has been cut, exactly 30 minutes after boot, every day, and then continues to operate perfectly fine for the rest of the day. I've been observing this behaviour for a week. The power-on Kernel-General event is at 8:25:00 this morning, and the Kernel-Power Event ID 41 event is at 8:55:17. Thirty minutes apart (with change for boot time.) Yesterday it was 8:28:36 and 8:58:56 respectively. Last Friday it was 8:21:35 and 8:51:50 respectively. There is a clear 30-minute lag time between system boot and system crash. This makes me believe that there is some sort of daily event, triggered 30-minutes after boot, that causes a hardware error and a hard-crash/power-cut. Obviously there is a hardware error, and I could solve the problem by playing mix-and-match with the hardware. However, the hardware error does not seem to affect the general operation of the machine: it works fine for the rest of the day. So the hardware error is being cued by a single software error. So what I need to know is: how can I track down the offending daily-run program? I would rather not take the simple route and replace the hardware. I would rather know how to track the execution of programs, and find the source of the problem through software. There does not seem to be an obvious, consistent cause in the Event Viewer, or the Task Scheduler. Thanks in advance for any help.

You might want to try Sysinternals Process Monitor Start recording everything 1 minute before the assumed time of shutdown. See if you have any suspicious activity. You need to somehow see if the recorded information lasts trough the shutdown. There is going to be a lot of data so its going to take some tie to catch the issue.You might need to use msconfig to suppress all the other startup processes. In addition you might need to set up filters for some processes to be excluded, because the information is going to be overflowing. You can try a safe mode to see if you get the issue again in safe mode. that will tell more about your computer, also you might need to try a different user profile to see if you get the same issue on a different user profile. If you get the issue in Safe mode then you can run the process monitor tool like that eliminating a lot of unnecessary services. If you don't get the issue in safe mode you already have a partial answer to the problem. You just have to find what is the offending process / driver. Good Luck.Please do not forget to select the best answer if it helps you! The Ultimate computer newbie guide since the discovery of spoon feeding! The Computer Manual dot Com

What are the details for the Kernel 41 error? Check them in the eventlog and check what apllies to your PC: Windows Kernel event ID 41 error in Windows 7 or in Windows Server 2008 R2: “The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first” http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2028504 If the bucheck code is not 0x0 you get a bug check. To see the cause of the bug check I have to take a look at the dumps with the Debugging Tools for Windows. Please start the Windows Explorer and go to the folder C:\Windows\Minidump. Next, copy the dmp files to your desktop, zip all dmp into 1 zip file and upload the zip file to your public Skydrive [1] folder and post a link here. André [1] http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itproui/thread/4fc10639-02db-4665-993a-08d865088d65"A programmer is just a tool which converts caffeine into code" CLIP- Stellvertreter http://www.winvistaside.de/